


Shaky Photographs and Pill Bottles

by Punk_Peter_Pan



Category: Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance
Genre: Angst, Fluff, M/M, Moving forward but not moving on
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-16
Updated: 2020-06-16
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:22:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24747517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Punk_Peter_Pan/pseuds/Punk_Peter_Pan
Summary: The first time Bronx goes into the attic it’s for this stupid dare. His friends told him if he didn’t, then he’d be a pussy and a loser so Bronx summoned up all of the dutch courage his father so graciously handed down to him and opened the latch. But what he finds makes him question decades of his father's history, which forces old secrets into a new light.(I wrote this last year and I'm not particularly fond of it but it did well when I posted it to Wattpad. Enjoy?)
Relationships: Mikey Way/Pete Wentz
Comments: 3
Kudos: 27





	Shaky Photographs and Pill Bottles

The first time Bronx goes into the attic it’s for this stupid dare. His friends told him if he didn’t, then he’d be a pussy and a loser so Bronx summoned up all of the dutch courage his father so graciously handed down to him and opened the latch. 

Dust shot up from the trap door leading into it, painting the room in shades of dark red and brown, shielding half of the room from view. Bronx coughed and waved his arm around, briefly thinking that it “smelt like grandmothers in here.” But a dare was a dare, and so he pushed through the grossness of it all and looked around for something to grab as proof he’d been up there. He stumbled towards a collection of boxes in the far left corner of the room, seeing an old jacket that probably smelt like someone died in it and felt like it too, but would be more than enough to satisfy his friends of his bravery. He grabbed the jacket, shaking off the dust which settled in his lungs. Without the layer of dust, the jacket was a dull white, frayed at the elbows and shoulders and heavy after years of dampness clung to the old denim.  
“Gross”  
He was about to put the jacket back down for a second, just to wipe his hand because, ew old people, when he noticed the frantic scrawled writing on the box it had been sitting on.  
2004-2007: you were gorgeous like the sun, you rose, and I was in love, then you set, and I never forgot the warmth you gave me - Pete Wentz  
‘2004? That’d be at least twenty years ago. What’s the box still doing here?’ Bronx thought. And even when he shrugged the thoughts of investigation off, carrying the jacket back to his friends, the tendrils of curiosity wrapped themselves around his brain, spiking questions of times he didn’t even exist in. 

The next time Bronx goes into the attic, it’s because he needs to find an old toy of his to give to Marvel. Which is totally dumb. But whatever. Crawling back through the shadowed mouth of the trapdoor, he immediately set to work finding the toy. After half an hour of searching, he groaned and rolled his eyes, and was about to give up when he saw the box, now with the jacket over it once again, in the corner of his eye.  
His first thought was ‘nope. If there is something in that box, I probably don’t wanna see it. It’s probably some nudes of a chick that dad kept for spank bank material.’  
But the words written on the box sounded too genuine, too tragic for some overenthusiastic fangirl.  
‘What’s the worst that can happen, right? It’s probably just pictures of him and mom when they met’ was his next thought, so coupled with the sudden determination to solve the gnawing of his unrelenting curiosity with purposeful strides, he quickly came upon the box and slashed it open with the attic keys. 

Shit.

That was definitely his dad.

But who the fuck was that other guy?

The box was filled with the most random assortment of objects Bronx had ever seen. A broken pair of thick, black glasses, an old and fraying gray beanie, a guitar pick, some jackets, a ridiculous amount of notebooks, what looked like the broken string of a bass guitar and what his dad had told him was a “sidekick”. But most interesting were the photos. At least a hundred of them scattered around the box, some folded or crumpled and some in old, yellow envelopes but all of them that dated from 2004-2005 featured an uneasily common theme. Bronx’s dad, young, with dark, dark hair and… was that makeup around his eyes? With a boy with sandy brown hair peeking out from a beanie, the same beanie, Bronx realised, that was in the box, with thick dark glasses and eyes that were a golden honey brown. A lot of the photos had messages on the back, messages of love and sunsets and long, never-ending summers all signed “peterpan”. Then suddenly, the photos turned tragic. A photo of blood on a guitar signed “I can’t write a song that matches the hole in my chest, so I put them in my wrist and watch my love for you drip down the strings of my guitar.” A photo of a bottle of pills, signed “I don’t want to do this again. But I am just a human. You twisted your hot asphalt beaten up piano fingers around my beating heart and ate it in front of me. What else is there left for me but emptiness?”  
Bronx walked backwards slowly. 

What happened? The photos from 2004 and 2005 had all been signed with messages like “summer runs through our veins, darling. It makes us invincible.” and “what if you’re the way I’m supposed to go? Every dark, dirty thing I hand over to you, cupped in my hands because I’m afraid it will slip through my fingers, you accept, even understand.” Then suddenly, they turned bitter and full of poisonous misery. There was a record in the box as well, of Fall Out Boy’s album, Infinity On High. On the back, in the same messy handwriting, the note “I wanted to be more subtle but I’ve never been good at that. I’m sorry I keep writing songs about you.” was written. It looked like it had been waiting to be sent, but a last minute flash of self-doubt had it rotting away in this box of memories.  
With a hundred questions running through his head, Bronx decided to settle the most simple one first. Who was the black-haired boy? Bronx dug right to the bottom of the box, where he found a photo of his dad and the boy, titled “Mikey Way, the coolest dude I've ever met.” followed by the guy- Mikey’s phone number.  
‘Well, shit.’ Bronx thought. ‘That’s a golden opportunity.’

Even though Bronx had Mikey’s phone number, he decided the next step in the process of solving the mystery of 2005 was asking his dad. So with a photo of Mikey and Pete clutched in his hand, he brought his dad to his room and asked him gently if he could question him about something. Pete chuckled.  
“Of course dude, I’m your dad.”  
With that, Bronx gently unfolded the photo and asked, “Who’s Mikey Way?”

Bronx had never seen his dad wear an expression like that. 

Like he’d eaten a dictionary of every horrible word and the words had raced through his bloodstream and gripped his brain, vice tight.  
“Where did you get that?” Pete asked, in a voice too soft to match his expression.  
“It was in the box, upstairs, the one labelled-”  
“You went through my shit?”  
Bronx stiffened and stayed silent.  
“I asked you a fucking question,” Pete said, voice raising on every syllable.  
Bronx took in a stuttering breath, eyes glued to the floor. “Yes.” He answered quietly.  
“Put it away. Now. And if you ever,” Pete said darkly, jabbing a finger into Bronx’s chest, “do that again, I will not hesitate to make you regret it.”

The third time Bronz goes into the attic, it’s to shakily put the photo away and to dial Mikey Way’s number after checking for the third time that the attic was locked from the inside. 

The phone rung.  
Once  
Twice  
Three times  
Then a voice pierced the stale air of the attic.

“Hello?”  
The voice was quiet like it was attached to someone who wasn’t confident enough to make the most of it.  
“Is this Mikey Way?” asked Bronx, loud as he dared.  
“Um… Yeah. Listen if you’re some fan we really appreciate you guys but-”  
“I'm Bronx. Bronx Wentz.”  
Silence.  
“Wentz. Like, um… like Pete Wentz?” Mikey asked, his voice somehow softening even more, but sounding strained, held back in a way.  
“I’m his son.”  
“Oh.”  
For such a small word, it was laced with a hundred emotions, the most present being… regret.  
“I need to ask you something,” Bronx stated. “My dad won’t tell me so I figured you were the next best thing.”  
Mikey didn’t reply, so Bronx kept talking.  
“I found a box, it’s labelled 2004-2007. Do any of those years mean something to you?”  
From the other side of the line,  
Swallow  
Inhale  
Sigh  
“Listen, kid, I’m gonna call your dad, make him talk to you, but I can’t tell you what happened between us. That’s for him to share, not for me. Although trust me, I’d like to. Call me after. Tell me what happened, okay?”  
“Yes sir.”

The line went dead.  
In another room, Pete Wentz’s phone started ringing.  
“Pete Wentz spea-”  
“Shut up. You gonna tell your kid the truth or shut him out like you did with me? Maybe grow a pair of balls and open up for once in your fucking life asshole.”  
And the call ended. 

The attic door burst open, the lock flying across the room as Bronx scrambled to get away from the debris. Once the explosion dust had cleared his dad already had a hand on his chest and was shoving him backwards.  
“What the fuck did you do.”  
Bronx stuttered out half of an apology before being interrupted again, “WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU DO?” Confusion and rage bubbled over inside Bronx and he screamed back “I LOOKED FOR THE TRUTH”  
Pete laughed, a cruel sound tinged with the choked back wetness of tears. “You called Mikey? Really? To ask about shit you don’t have a single right to know about? That is my history. My fucking history you do not get to pry into that.”  
“Why won’t you tell me anything?” Bronx shouted back. “Why don’t you open up about anything before I was born? I don’t get to know anything about you because you refuse to open up!”  
Pete shook his head, laughing for a moment again before it twisted into a broken sob, when he met his son’s eyes again, his face was streaked with tears and his breathes were coming out in broken heaves. Confusion flashed through Bronx again. He’d seen his dad cry, but this, this was something completely new.  
“Dad, I don’t understand. Please just help me understand.” Bronx asked softly.  
“You wanna know what happened? Huh? I’ll tell you what happened. In 2005, on Warped Tour in summer I met Mikey Way and fell completely in love with him. He was my… god he was my everything. He felt like summer and smelt like coffee and cigarettes and I never understood the concept of love before I met him and then I was stupid and naive and scared of what the world would do if it found out about us so when that summer was over, I told him we couldn’t be together. That we were over.” The words bubbled out of Pete’s mouth like Bronx had twisted an old rusty tap, and instead of water, twenty years of repressed emotions came out.  
“And that’s bad? That you had some fling with a guy twenty years ago?” Bronx asked.  
“No that’s not the issue. The issue is that no matter how hard I try I can’t get the fuck over him. If soulmates exist, he was mine. And I let him go and now he’s happy so I wrote album after album about him and hoped that he loved me too but he moved on and I was left with a woman that I didn’t really love and a box full of memories I didn’t have the strength to open. It’s pathetic. I’m fucking pathetic Bronx. He doesn’t give a shit about me anymore and I can’t even look at him in a photo. You deserve a dad and a mom who love each other, not some dead-beat asshole pining for someone he can never ever have again.” And Pete was crying again, hot angry tears that wet his shirt and carved lines through the dust on his face.  
“Happy?” Pete asked, the question hissing through his teeth.  
Pete didn’t get an answer before leaving, stumbling blindly backwards into his bathroom and staring at his face in the mirror. In a blinding flash of memory he saw his 26 year old face stare back at him, streams of black down his face and fresh angry cuts on his wrists, clutching a bottle of pills. Pete rubbed his eyes, damming the vision to hell. He got himself to bed, helped tremendously by a bottle of whiskey, whilst refusing to think of Mikey Way.

Bronx stood still in the attic, still in shock over the words of his father. His father, who claimed time and time again that he was straight, that he kissed boys for laughs or because he was drunk had now just admitted to having loved, and still being in love with a boy Bronx had never even seen. He called Mikey again.

“You guys talked yet?” Mikey asked, nervous, Bronx now knew, for a reason.  
“You loved him?” Bronx answered back.  
“Don’t give me all the credit. He loved me too.”  
It seemed Bronx’s rational brain had taken a vacation when the next sentence spewed from his chapped lips. “He still does.”  
Bronx wasn’t finished and Mikey wasn’t talking so suddenly it all came pouring out, out to a stranger on the phone that his dad had known long, long ago.  
“He loves you. Says he doesn’t have the strength to look at photos cause he regrets leaving you so much. You should have seen him, it’s like he hasn’t been happy since you left.”  
Over the next couple of minutes, Bronx discovered that Mikey was a very good listener and that Bronx was a very good talker. By the time Bronx was finished, he could hear Mikey’s slow, deliberate breaths over the phone.  
“I’m sorry he got mad at you. Thank you for telling me this. I promise I’m gonna make it right, okay? I’m gonna make it right.”  
Then, he hung up.

A week and a half later, at exactly 12:17 pm, three sharp knocks rang out clear through the Wentz household.  
“I’ll get it!” Pete shouted. Bronx ran onto the staircase to see who it was just as his dad opened the door.  
Pete’s beer crashed to the floor, as did his jaw.  
A man, who Bronx recognised as a much older version of the Mikey Way in the pictures from the box stood in the doorway.  
“Mikey Way,” Pete said slowly like he was tasting the name on his tongue for the first time.  
“Pete Wentz.” Mikey returned. He crowded Pete into the house, closing the door behind him slowly, before turning to face Pete again. Mikey cocked his head slightly, studying Pete, who was shaking and looked like he’d seen a ghost. Then, with one decisive moment, Mikey grabbed Pete roughly by the jaw and hauled him into a desperate kiss, which Pete eagerly returned, wrapping his arms around Mikey and holding him like he was starved for it. 

“I love you too,” Mikey said, just loud enough for Bronx to catch whilst scrambling up the stairs. “You fucking asshole.”


End file.
